Colm Breathnach

Colm Breathnach Poems

Colm Breathnach Biography

Breathnach was born Cork City in 1961. He studied philosophy and Irish at UCC and now works as a terminologist with the Department of Education and as a translator with the Government translation service. He is four times winner of the Oireachtas premier prize for poetry in Irish. ‘. . . just the clear exposure of a soul without self pity or shame . . .’ (‘Heart and Rock’) This Cervantean attitude to life and the world, and hence to the subject matter of his poetry, in which bravery and equanimity play a major part, accepting and daring to delight in the multifariousness of the human condition, intimates the essence of Breathnach’s poetic vision.)

The Best Poem Of Colm Breathnach

Border

at your temple a revolver mouth
in the middle of the night

and you know you are to be shot
into the boundless eternity

because there is a border around your voice
an accent that belongs to just one place

an accent not shared by the mouth of the gun
that will leave you as a chunk of meat

beside a road
that goes nowhere

because all directions have come to an end in your case

I am filled with self-pity and terror
as I pull the trigger

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